Winning Mr. Olympia is indisputably the peak of achievement in bodybuilding. And it has been for years: It’s the competition Arnold Schwarzenegger was training for in the classic 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, after all. Winning just one would be the pinnacle of a bodybuilder’s career. Winning multiple means you’re an all-time great.
Chris Bumstead has won five in a row. He competes in “classic physique,” a newer category that emphasizes proportions and symmetry over absolute size. (You know, relatively speaking.) This week, he’s looking to extend that to a sixth consecutive title. Mr. Olympia is the only competition he enters all year, but it still requires year-round dedication to lifting and eating to get huge and strong, and then “cutting” into fighting shape.
He’s learned to lessons along the way—GQ caught up with CBum as he prepped for this year’s competition to hear about his cleaner diet, intense recovery routine, and the mental work he’s done to stay cool under pressure.
For Real-Life Diet, GQ talks to athletes, celebrities, and other high performers about their diet, exercise routines, and pursuit of wellness. Keep in mind that what works for them might not necessarily be healthy for you.
GQ: You're mid Olympia prep right now—what’s that like?Chris Bumstead: The best way I can explain it is in the span of the year there's peaks and valleys of trying to grow and trying to get big. The majority of my year is just putting on weight, eating as much as possible, training to get as strong as possible or as big as possible, and just putting on as much muscle as you can. Then 16 weeks before the competition, I get on a diet, start doing a little bit more cardio and then the goal becomes cutting as much body fat while maintaining as much muscle as possible. From there I’m whittling down my calories and increasing my cardio. So you are pretty much tired, hungry, exhausted, and you have to work harder than you have the entire year. It just becomes a mental battle of discipline and trying to get your body as lean as possible while still maintaining as much as possible.
How do you handle that level of stress and mental fatigue?I don't really have a lot of balance when it comes to prep in bodybuilding. I just kind of go balls to the wall, throw my bounds out the window—when you’re in prep you just gotta do what you gotta do. But throughout the year, because I only compete once, I can give myself a little bit of time reprieve, like to go out for dinner with my wife, to travel, to have a little bit of a downtime and then that builds me up to be able to do it again. If I were competing constantly throughout the year, I would burn out a lot faster.
I also just force my brain into other things besides bodybuilding. My life is bodybuilding, but I don't really spend a lot of my time talking about it. I'm in the gym a few hours a day and when I'm out of it, I'm with my family, with my wife, or I'm at work and talking about business. Instead of it being constantly on my mind 24/7, I'm able to put my time into other things.
One of the biggest ways I've found that I'm able to handle more stress is by leaning in on my relationships, specifically with my wife. To be able to connect with her to share my stress with her, to have moments with her. I just realized that helps me kind of regulate a lot more efficiently than I would have in the past trying to bottle it all up and handle it by myself. It usually leads to a mild implosion over time.
With strength sports in particular it can feel very isolating at times because it's all you. You have to go to the gym, you have to go perform by yourself. I think having that kind of support system is really helpful.I've realized over the past few years especially as the Olympia starts coming in, my stress really compounds. Every single day matters. My sleep matters for how much I recover for how hard I train the next day. My digestion has to be perfect, relating to my stress. If anything's going wrong at work, or with travel or anything at all, it all compounds. It takes me away from my work, and it kind of compounds into a lot more stress.
You need to be able to slow down and put life into perspective and understand that there's only so much you can really control. All you can do is move forward and focus on what's next rather than what's behind you.
Have you found that it’s gotten easier to stay in that zone and really be locked in as your career has gone on?It did for a while, and then recently it got a lot harder for various reasons. For a while bodybuilding was all just fun—hanging out and working out. Then I started winning Olympias and then I felt the pressure to have to be the best. I had to kind of reframe my mindset to try to compete against myself rather than other people. I was getting into a good routine and my life was purely bodybuilding. It consisted of sleeping, eating, and training. That was it.
And then four years ago now I moved down to Florida, started a business and have been involved in growing the company. And that even though I have a lot of business partners helping me, the mental stress takes me away from focusing on one thing and one goal, which is being Mr. Olympia. It definitely makes it a lot harder to get into the groove of where I need to be.
And now as well, I started this prep and my baby was probably four weeks old. So I’ve got a child, the family, business and trying to win Olympia. Over the years I've gotten better, but life has given me more obstacles that I need to be better at handling. It's gotten harder, but I've gotten stronger.
I’ve been thinking a lot about being more efficient in my own training lately and coming to the realization that it’s not about being hype-efficient in the gym, but buttoning up everything else in your life around so that when you do get to the gym, you’re 100% there.Yeah, I think a lot of people also get the whole efficiency thing wrong. Like you said, they just think of time in the gym and just time to do what they need to do. And I'll take the example of my relationship with my wife. I can think I need to be efficient, isolate myself, spend more time at the gym or X, Y, and Z, but that's more likely to lead to disconnection with my life and It's more likely to lead to stress in my relationship, which will take away from me being able to focus on bodybuilding. So if I actually pour more time into my relationship and be able to stay connected with my wife then we're able to work through challenges together rather than separate. It's actually making me more efficient. That's why I have a really strong foundation.
What does your recovery plan look like these days?I'm definitely huge on sleep but I also—I'm recently kind of discovering that people who are obsessed with sleep are usually people who suck at sleeping. I have shit sleep and I've always not been a sleeper. So I put a lot of focus and emphasis on having 10 hours of downtime from when I go to bed to when I have to wake up. So my mind can calm down and sleep. I use blackout curtains, supplements, and stay off my phone. We have recessed lighting in our bedroom and bathroom and it can change colors to red, so I get no blue light at night. We have separate AC for the bedroom so I can crank the AC down to 60 but the baby's not freezing out in the other room. Sleep is really everything for bodybuilding. It’s good for muscle growth and hormone regulation. Overall, sleep is huge.
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Nutrition is also a huge factor. I used to just think about getting calories and protein in. That was before I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, which made me really focus on my health, inflammatory diets, healthy foods and how they affect your gut and everything. In turn, eating healthy year-round rather than just in competition season has made my recovery and ability to continue to be healthy so much more efficient. Eating clean foods rather than just focusing on calories and protein, which a lot of bodybuilders do, has helped me a lot. I don't just go get McDonald's because it has a lot of calories. I make sure I get a high quality grass fed beef and everything.
I also do things—like, I get stem cells. Two times a year I'll go to Mexico or Dubai and get a shot to help bring my inflammation down and help with my autoimmune a lot. I sauna and cold plunge two to three times a week. I get deep-tissue massage work done two or three times a week, which is two hours each time. So I probably spend four to six hours on the table every week. I started working with a new trainer now where we have like 20 minutes before and after my workouts where I do remedial work on specific postural muscles and tendons that are more likely to get injured and stretching and whatnot.
I feel like it’s a bit difficult today to find what the best recovery methods are since it feels like it’s a changing trend every other week—do you have anything that’s been a specific staple for you for a long time now?I mean, it's trending now but I've been doing it for a long time: The cold plunge. I got a cold plunge seven years ago before they actually made them. I just bought a deep freezer and put a hose in it and put a timer on the plug. So it stayed at the temperature I needed and I used to get into that in my garage. Then all the research has come out that was bad for hypertrophy and it would make me lose muscle and all these things. It made me feel good though. It decreased my inflammation. I didn't do it directly after training and the trends went from “It's bad for hypertrophy” to “it’s good for hypertrophy.” I've been doing it the whole time and I enjoy it.
I think there's something very key to sticking to methods that bring you comfort versus whatever is being touted as the most effective and efficient currently.I used to get really in my head about this. Sleep was an obsession, being home at a certain time, not going out late, doing all these things, and I just kind of almost isolated myself thinking that it would decrease the most amount of stress and everything. But every now and then if there's people going out for dinner or a social event or something,I find if I go out, I'm able to just relax and have fun with my friends. I lose a little bit of sleep when I throw out my schedule a little bit but the cortisol release, just the enjoyment, the not giving a fuck for a moment is often more beneficial than obsessing over being perfect.
Do you use any sort of wearable tech or anything to collect data on your training?I got a Whoop a year ago or something and all my friends had HRV’s of like 70 to 100 and my HRV was like 20, and REM sleep was like seven minutes, and I just ended up stressing about it. I was just thinking about it too much. I'd look at it in the morning and the rest of my day I'd be like “fuck, I slept like shit, now I'm tired” whereas before I didn't even think about it. I stopped wearing it for a while and I did everything I felt like I needed to do to work on my sleep. So now maybe like three to four times a month I'll throw it on and track my sleep and see what my sleep is to make sure I'm actually getting into REM sleep and other things. I don't like the details of those numbers because I'm more of an overthinker and sometimes too much data that's not coming from my own intuition messes with my head.
How do you handle the pressure of being a returning Olympia champion?It's funny, when I was younger I used to say this thing called the pressure of privilege. And it was before I even understood what pressure was because I hadn’t won anything and then I started winning and I'm like “oh shit.” This is what it really feels like. This is like I have to win, I have to do this, I have to do X, Y, and Z. All that was doing was stressing me out and taking away from my ability to perform.
Most PopularYou can actually have it so good to have more of a “I get to do this” mindset. I'm choosing to do this. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to be able to achieve. Then it really kind of took a lot of pressure off. Even though I am winning and I absolutely compete to win I worked hard on defining my own definitions of winning and losing. In this Olympia specifically, I built some non-negotiables with myself—how hard I work knowing that every day I go and work as hard as I can. I stay on top of my variables and I control my diet, my nutrition and everything.
But I also wasn't willing to stake my relationship with my wife, especially going through this new opportunity with a child and a newborn. I wanted to stay connected to my baby. I want to make sure I still had one-on-one time with her. I was still helping, taking naps with her, changing diapers, and feeding her. Doing all the things that I didn't want bodybuilding to take away from me. I didn't want to use bodybuilding as an excuse to be selfish in my family life. And to me that was gonna be a win.
Changing my definition of what winning failure really means. I had definitely relieved a lot of the pressure because stuff in my control. I'm competing to beat myself and to make sure that I'm keeping up with my own values that are most important to me. And at the end of the day, if I win or lose—I'll be pissed if I lose, but I know that I stayed true to myself. I'm not gonna live with regret for the rest of my life. It will be a moment of being pissed that I lost and then I'm gonna move on. I'd be proud that I was able to still hold what I really held dear to my heart.
Do you have any other downtime activities outside of lifting that you use to just decompress and chill?I do read, I’m a Kindle guy. I'll have like four books going on at once. Fiction, nonfiction, fantasy, whatever it might be depending on my mood. I started watching anime actually, like five years ago—I wasn't allowed to when I was young.
Some Demon Slayer?[laughs] Yeah some Demon Slayer. I think recently it's really just been spending a lot of time with my family.
Have you made any other big changes this year that you feel like have really helped you succeed?I always look at a lot of my success coming down to my mindset and being able to handle the mental side of things. A lot of help I've gotten has been from going to therapy over the years. It's funny, my mom was a social worker and encouraged therapy, but I was always so anti-therapy and I felt like I was fine. Nothing seriously traumatic happened to me and I was fine. I could just handle it all. That was OK. You start to get more responsibilities and life gets more real as you get older, and I started to feel a lot more anxiety and stress in my life.
Most PopularGoing to therapy really helped out a lot. One of the big things that helped teach me was the ability to just to feel and accept feelings rather than suppress them and just try to avoid them and go back to the grind. Actually letting them come out and give them space. But also how important it is to coregulate and share that with someone that you have a trusting relationship with. I'm becoming a huge believer that as humans were built to co regulate totally with a person and in a safe community. I was much more an isolated, internal, just kind of antisocial person at a young age and all that did was lead to more stress. So that's a huge thing that's allowed me to feel better. It was kind of opening my heart up more in our relationships and therapy.
I feel there's also this thing touted with masculinity that you have to keep your feelings inside. I had the same exact experience when I started going to therapy, and it was a huge relief to just have someone to talk to and to give you the tools to work through your problems.I found that people always mistake the whole masculinity thing. They mistake how to get there. The whole movement was stoicism and people tried stoic, to be masculine, and there's nothing wrong with being stoic. But if you're trying to be stoic, you're not. I feel like true stoicism is when are secure and strong and able to process the hard things. Feel your emotions and move through them rather than deny them. Then you're at peace with who you are in your life.
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